Experts say no.
With the festivals of Holi and the Mahakumbh in Haridwar just round the corner, and five states in the midst of a hectic election season, India’s “second wave” is firmly upon us, data indicate. “A second wave of Covid-19 in India is very clear from the data now,” said Rijo John, a health economist and adjunct professor at Rajagiri College of Social Sciences, Kerala. This rise comes along with the presence of new variants of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, and scientists are still trying to figure out how these variants behave. Is another lockdown the answer, or is it somehow getting individuals, communities, businesses and administrators to behave with Covid-19 precautions? Experts point out that lockdowns will once again destroy livelihoods and squeeze the economy. Instead, they say, India must double down on genomic sequencing to spot new variants, the pace of vaccination must pick up, and Covid-19 precautions must continue apace. “When Covid-19 cases began to fall in early 2021, people began to feel like the pandemic was behind us,” said Srinath Reddy, president of the Public Health Foundation of India. “With greater mobility and mingling, we gave the SARS-CoV-2 virus an additional chance to surge through.” India’s confirmed cases of Covid-19 had reached its peak on September 16,2020, at 97,860 cases confirmed in a single day. From this high point, India’s Covid-19 numbers came down to a low of just 8,579 cases confirmed on February 1. Thus, in the early months of 2021, India’s curve of the pandemic had begun to flatten, making it appear like the pandemic was being beaten down. In this same period, testing too reached its high point in September, and similarly fell in February: from 14.9 lakh tests done on a single day on September 24,2020, to a low point of just 4,86,122 tests on February 14. But cases have been on a rise since then, and on March 21, the central government reported about 47,000 cases. In other words, India’s confirmed cases had risen 4.5 times since the low point of February 1. At the same time, vaccination has not been happening at the pace needed in order for India to achieve its target, we reported in March. Two months into the programme, India has met 7% of its target to administer 50 crore doses by July. It must administer 36.5 lakh shots per day to achieve this target. “From my regular analysis of Covid-19 data, it shows that daily new cases on a seven-day average have risen by 167% (from its seven-day average low point in February), deaths have increased 71% in the same period, but daily testing has increased only by 31% in this same period,” said John. “There is an evident surge ongoing in 10 states and union territories currently.” “We urgently need deeper dives into the data on Covid-19 cases, hospitalisations, deaths, and genome sequencing data, to understand why there is a spike in cases in India,” said Gagandeep Kang, professor at the Christian Medical College in Vellore.
